Misreading the signs (6)

(Mis-)Spotted earlier:

Free Poignancy Test Available Here

- and one I recall from a few weeks ago,

Working To Save The Livers Of The Elderly

(for those who have found my blog only recently, these are examples of the many times when I glance in passing at adverts, posters, signs, headlines and so on, and somehow manage to misread them and give them a rather different meaning).

In other news, I bought a bunch of bananas along with the rest of my groceries the other day. Can I find them?

HOW CAN YOU LOSE A BUNCH OF BANANAS?
(sorry for shouting)

Torrential brain (or, snatching jaws from the victory of defeat)

Nothing like a modest title for a blog post, I tend to think. Yes, this one is definitely nothing like a modest title for a blog post.

Still.

I've been in a pretty dark place the last few days. Not a bad place, I hasten to add, but a dark one nonetheless. Do excuse me the indulgence of quoting myself from a previous post, but this is the key to what it's been all about:

I've been spending a lot of my evening time working on more music. New stuff, and brushing up some existing ideas. I've already found myself with a little bit of insight into the near future, knowing what my mental processes are like when developing such ideas: they feel exciting and fresh and worth pursuing right now, and I'm pretty sure that in a couple of weeks time I'll think they're all nothing more than various grades of absolute tedious shite, and that's when I'll start worrying, as the time gets ever nearer.

Yep, and that's hit me with full force in the last week or so. This time a couple of weeks ago I was doing just fine, to the extent that after an evening's work hunched in front of laptop, guitar, keyboards and whatever else, I would then listen to a recording of the set I played at the end of August: feeling perhaps a little elated I would grin as the recording played one song and then the next (not least at the fact that there was applause), thinking to myself, I can't fail!

The ideas have been filling my mind, and any spare time at work - or anywhere else for that matter - has seen me immersed in their flow. In some ways work has felt like an anchor, or something to keep my feet on the ground. Last week I spent plenty of time working on these ideas, allowing for happy accidents, twists and turns into unplanned territory, keeping the whole process elastic and fresh, feeling constructive about it all.

Until Friday. I was just tired on Friday. I usually am, and I'm hardly unique in that respect. I was going out in the evening anyway, so when I got home I just sort of flopped for a while before heading out. Which meant that I'd already taken a step back from the music. Which meant that at the back of my mind were rumblings of disquiet searching around for an outlet, a means with which to bother me.

The feeling built over the weekend. For a change, my drink of choice on Friday and Saturday night was red wine (as opposed to beer) and that also seemed to foster a completely different mentality. The very fact of standing chatting to friends with a glass of wine rather than a pint of Abbot's informed all sorts of subtle variations on what would be the norm: in terms of the way the wine affected me, in terms of the different pace at which I drank, in terms of the after effects. Whilst I didn't get any further than being merry and enjoying both evenings out, then by Sunday I felt rather low and washed out, and also felt more removed from the previous sense of sheer immersion in the music making process.

That plangent rumbling of disquiet at the back of my mind found its outlet with full force between the hours of 3 and 5am this morning as I lay unable to sleep, being taunted by the very opposite of the spirit that had caused me to rhetorically ask, how can I fail? so recently. Now I was just as immersed in self doubt and panic, thinking what the hell have I been doing these last couple of weeks? It's shit - complete and utter shit! I've wasted too much time, I won't be ready for the upcoming gigs, I'm unprepared and my ideas are all terrible and I don't know what the fuck I'm gonna do though it's obvious I'm going to completely show myself up and I'm going to fail and then where will I be and so on and so forth.

I got back to sleep.

This evening I was more tired than Friday. Thankfully today has been pretty hectic, which soaked up some of the strange negativity that plagued even my better moments over the weekend - and which definitely stopped me from succumbing to the after effects of a poor night's sleep. Back home I sat around for a while, then quite begrudgingly I dragged myself over to the laptop and various other bits of equipment.

Fuck it, I thought. Just do something. I resumed work on something I'd left alone for a couple of weeks. Don't expect anything, I thought. Just go through some of the mechanics needed to take it a stage further, and see what happens. No, don't even see what happens, it's going to be shit anyway. I mean, really shit. It doesn't matter.

Expectations thus reduced, it took minutes before I was immersed once again and spent the next three hours seeing the realisation of this particular idea begin to take more definite shape: suddenly the pendulum has swung the other way again and I'm seeing things in terms of possibility. Three hours of editing and converting sound files, altering tempos, adding filters, removing filters again, and then just turning the volume up and playing.

Sometimes I wonder why on earth I put myself through all these processes: and then I remember, this is just how I seem to deal with stuff.

Miswriting the Signs

Yes, I read the sign correctly for once.

The sign was in the window of a furniture shop, which purportedly sells

Chester Draws

Must pop in there one day and see what the hell that is.

Olive dream

I dreamt I was in an old - no, a positively ancient - building, where archaic rituals took place and where creaking doors were opened as part of these rituals, seemingly as though they were portals to the very past itself.

I was there with a co-conspirator, we were infiltrators, out to cause serious havoc and mischief. We knew what to do: we were armed with a jar of pitted olives and some toothpicks.

Heavy duty

I was in the supermarket yesterday morning, on the last day of a long weekend well away from work and anything related.

The cashier, as she was scanning my items through the checkout till, said

Do you want me to give you the heavy stuff?

My immediate (but thankfully unspoken) response, was to wonder whether I should ask,

What's going on? Is everything alright?

...and then I realised she was just referring to the stuff I was buying, that it would make sense put the heavier things in my bag first. At times like this I wonder if there's a part of me which never quite truly leaves work behind.

Still, I also remember the time when a cashier had to give me all of my change in coins. She apologised as she did so.

I'm sorry, I've got no notes.

I'm not sure quite how I resisted the temptation to say Well, how do you smell?, though it was probably for the best that I did so.

Sunset, sea and sand

There were plenty of people around, and the muffled throb of music emanating from the pier. Somehow, though, I just remember connecting with the silence, and feeling blissfully far away.

Container

One aspect of being a bit hectic and having lots to (constructively) think about recently is that I worry less. My level of worry is perhaps currently not too far from what might be considered "normal" or even "healthy." I think this is partially what I was referring to in the previous post.

There are a couple of things happening at the moment which would otherwise, I think it's reasonable to say, be exercising me far more than they actually are, but which are thus contained - though not ignored or diminished.

One of these is the health of my mother. I spent the day in London yesterday but had asked her to ring me and let me know how things were once she had been to the hospital - she had an appointment in the afternoon, the outcome of which was potentially cause for concern.

I didn't get a call on my mobile, but thought I may as well wait until I got home: she usually leaves messages on my landline. I didn't get home until very late last night, however there was no message, nor did she appear to have actually called in the first place. It was too late to ring her and I was too tired anyway.

So this morning when I got up I could feel myself tapping into the worry. Things which have been there in the back of my mind, starting to head into view and, in the not-knowing, a hint of extrapolation of anxiety-provoking scenarios.

It was the latter that made me tell myself to get a grip and just get on and make the phone call. So I got a grip and made the phone call and (not for the first time), things are ok and suitably contained in themselves for the time being - and what had happened was that my mother must have misdialled my number. She had left a message for me, unfortunately on someone else's phone.

Worry has thus been put back in its place. But it reminded me in stark terms just how much better I'm functioning, the fact that there's been so little opportunity to allow it to flourish.